Pastor Courtney Ellis started birding during the pandemic. Her life was forever changed the moment she started looking up. She found hope, amidst grief.
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As an ornithologist by profession and birder by passion (since 3 years old), I can relate to this article. Especially the phrase “Birding became this dance from delight to grief and then back again”.
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Thanks for the article.
I will be participating as an amateur in:
in Waterloo Region in southern Ontario.
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Birding around here is depressing: out where I do my conservation the number of bird species has been decreasing, and the same seems to be true in town – though I suspect that in town it has to do with the overall bird population decreasing, largely due to people with “outdoor” cats plus the strays that people feed.
I very much enjoyed Global Big Day. My friend, who is a birder, counted 43 species. I will say that the most interesting for me was a Bald Eagle, which I have never seen before in southern Ontario. We were at a fairly wild forested area, near a river, with tall trees, one of which clearly had an eagle’s nest. I don’t have a good camera with telephoto lens, so sorry no photo.
The other thing I discovered, that I’m sure all ornithologists know about, is the Merlin Bird Identification smartphone app, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
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I know Courtney from Threads! And she worked with my brother at a camp back in the day. How fun to see her featured here.
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There is at least one pair of Red Kites that soar overhead where we live. When you hear them cry you can’t help but look up.
Richard
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I have glimpsed one of those once, but it’s difficult to get a picture of a bird that disappeared into a field while one is riding a bus, so no pictures yet.
They are either too far away to photograph or I haven’t got the camera ready. The bigger problem is when I am driving. It is so tempting to look up then!
Richard
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I saw a blue jay today for the first time in months.
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I still remember my lifer Blue Jay. (There are only Steller’s Jays on the Pacific Coast where I grew up). It was in Saskatoon, January 1989 at about -26 C. where I’d just moved to start my Ph.D. Was so keen to see the new jay I headed on foot into the strange city without a map and got lost in the grey, frosty haze wandering for a couple of hours along bleak suburb streets. Eventually found my way back to campus by following the river bank before freezing to death. The jay eluded me that first day but I finally managed to see one the following day when someone told me about a yard with a feeder!
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That is funny – people in BC probably see Bald Eagles regularly (probably not in Saskatchewan?). I see Blue Jays in my backyard almost every day. That was a serious effort on your part.
Then there are a bunch of them that gather regularly on a field in downtown Toronto 
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Yes very funny isn’t it how one’s location affects perceptions of birds as “common junk birds” versus novel and exotic. Yeah, bald eagles are a dime a dozen in B.C., I see a few almost every day along the river near my condo. They congregate, literally by the hundreds, along rivers during salmon spawning times. Bald eagles are actually fairly common in the boreal forest in the northern half of Saskatchewan too (not a common as in B.C. though), but not so common in the agricultural lands in the south.
Go Jays go!
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Just to see a wild Eagle is something in the UK, Especially the further south you get. The other sought after bird is the Osprey.
Richard
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Yes, the white-tailed sea eagles (the European Bald-Eagle equivalents) are making a slow comeback in Scandinavia, from what I understand, but I think they are still pretty rare in Britain. Ospreys are cool raptors too. People here are trying to recover their numbers by building artificial nesting platforms, with some success.
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I have had a love of birds from childhood but never made any connections between them and my faith, in that respect the interview was very enlightening. They might also provide some diverting sermon illustrations that I had not considered before.
Richard
I can remember when the first breeding pair showed up on our stretch of the coast. Their offspring spread slowly around the area near that first nest, then one day I saw one on the complete other side of the cape they were on. I think it was two years after that that a pair settled on an old barely-surviving tree on a dune ridge near where I do conservation work; now there are two pairs out there.
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My Ph.D. supervisor worked on Bald Eagles in the 1980s in northern (boreal) Saskatchewan for his Ph.D. I guess a small but stable population survived there that was not as much affected by DDT as it was farther south in the States. Although I worked on kestrels for my own Ph.D., I had the privilege of going out to band the bald eagles with the “eagle crew” over the course of several summers. How thrilling to see these birds up close! But handle carefully 
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One of my favorite memories growing up was when my Grandfather took me out to see the curlews nesting. These are shorebirds that fly inland to nest, in our case to southwestern Idaho. One of my college professors was an expert in prairie dogs and raptor ecology, so I got some behind the scenes experiences at the Birds of Prey Center in Boise. At the time, they also housed some California condors, so that was pretty cool to see. It looks like they are still running the same program.
https://peregrinefund.org/projects/california-condor
High desert might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there are some cool birds. A couple hours out of the valley and there are a whole host of new species in the mountains.
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I probably have met some of the people you met at the Birds of Prey Center…at raptor conferences. Was at a raptor meeting in Boise many years ago. But oh man. Yes, the avifauna of deserts are so amazing and cool. After my first sabbatical, I took a long road trip detour back north to Canada (wink), birding in Texas, Arizona, Utah, and driving up through Idaho on the way back in scenery I can only describe as magical–surreal. For this northerner, the desert landscape, the cacti etc. was just like a scene from the old cartoons “coyote and roadrunner”. I remember standing beside some saguaro in total amazement, and looking at the spring blooming and hummingbirds and roadrunners and wrens and sparrows…
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